Teachers don’t like to go to school.

This probably seems self evident. I suspect this is because they know what goes on in school and are less interested in subjecting themselves to the same kinds of activities that they subject their students to. This is probably doubly true of online classes.

And I’m also being quite righteously “tongue-in-cheek” here.

But this allegation comes from my experience in offering an online course in teaching teachers online. We offer a professional development course here at the U and are singularly unsuccessful in getting teachers to sign up for it. The course is geared toward special education teachers, many of whom are going online in order to broaden their student bases. The key element here is that the course is geared for teachers (primarily college faculty) who are making the transition from classroom based to online delivered instruction. It’s a difficult course. As you might imagine, I can be a challenge as an instructor.

The fact remains that 90% of online teachers have no clue what they’re doing. That so much time and effort is spent on “control issues” is my prima facie evidence. From the use of chat room ‘etiquette’ (”type a ? if you wish to ask a question…”) to the constant issue of reducing student use of email to classifying threaded discussion/forum posting as “interaction” and the continuing use of powerpoint shovelware and templated learner management systems promoting themselves as learning management, the people who are doing the education continue to demonstrate their lack of understanding of basic issues relating to the environment. To me, this is the equivalent of teachers complaining about dark class rooms because they don’t know that there’s a light switch — let alone how to turn it on.

I was recently accused of arrogance because I had the audacity to comment that any course that ONLY used the commercial templated service was doing a disservice to the students. I was told, “Many teachers are getting excellent results using just the facitilities in BlackBoard.”

I’m sorry.

That’s like saying people who only ever owned a horse are statisfied with the distance they can travel in a day while riding alongside the autobahn with Maseratis and Mercedes available for free. I’m sure they are satisfied, but only because they don’t really understand what’s possible. They try out the Mercedes by sitting in the back seat, saying “giddyup”, and complaining because they can’t find the reins.

We designed this course several years ago and modified it as new ideas and technologies have been brought online. In spite of it being a very effective (based on followup interviews 2 and 3 years after the course completed), we haven’t been able to get sufficient enrollments for the course to make on a regular basis. Up until recently, I’ve been blaming the promotional efforts of the U.

Duh. May as well blame the cow for not giving orange juice.

And that last metaphor underscores the problem.

The problem is that a course — even the very best one — isn’t going to make that much difference. Not that courses aren’t valuable for some things. Homilies about fish and fishing aside, when you’re hungry you want food, not a 15 week course in cooking.

And teachers are hungry.

I keep seeing these ads for courses coming over the distance ed listservs and thinking, “Hm, competition. Cool.” At the same time, I think, “I’d like to take that but I don’t have time (or money).” And on the same lists are repetitive requests for insight, information, and guidance on how to do this, that, or the other thing online.

My late granny woulda said, “If t’were a bear, idda bit cha!”

Over the last few days as we count down to having to cancel another offering of the course and my enrollment holds stubbornly at ZERO, it’s becoming more and more clear to me that we’re on the wrong track. We need some other approach to teaching teachers that there are better approaches to education than the online equivalent of “keeping them in their seats and keeping them quiet.”

A listserv isn’t cutting it. I suspect that one of the problems is that the people who need the most help don’t know about the list. Most of them don’t read blogs. Probably don’t surf the web. Even with the excellent content in the DEOS-L archive, the questions can’t get answered if they’re not asked. The people with the questions don’t know they have them and wouldn’t know where to ask if they did. They can’t see the conversations happening around them and they can’t hear the voices that might help them.

So the challenge becomes how to communicate with these “digital deaf-blind” … ?

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 7th, 2006 at 9:50 am and is filed under Online Community, Education, Distance Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.